Advanced Flow Control for High Speed Propulsion Systems

高速吸气式推进系统的研究和发展一般与先进推进系统的前沿国家联系在一起。理解和发展这些概念所需的研究往往适用于更广泛的领域。最近在卡尔顿大学与日本宇宙航空研究开发机构Kakuda空间推进中心合作进行的关于吸气式火箭推进的研究实验表明，交换进气概念在显著缩短发动机长度方面是有效的，同时与更传统的设计相比更接近理论最佳。等离子体激励器已被证明在低速时在大范围的设备上有效地改变边界层以延迟或加速分离。然而，它们对内部高速空气动力学的潜在影响是一个开放的研究领域。因此，这两种技术(交换进气口和等离子激励器)的结合将提供一个独特的机会，通过研究支配可压缩空气动力学和电磁学之间关系的基本原理，为先进的推进技术做出贡献。与超燃冲压发动机推进中的激进农业概念类似，等离子激励器的顺序操作可以产生电离流。如果实现了足够的电离以加速、提取/输入能量或主动引导流动，则可以通过电磁操纵这些口袋。根据等离子体激励器的设计，可以产生微小的射流、回流和漩涡，从而产生微小的流动扰动。这对需要混合的过程(如快速燃烧)以及入口和内部流动都是有益的，当流动沿着壁面轮廓流动时，入口和内部流动通常是最有效的。这些扰动的大小和形状可以根据等离子体激励器本身的设计而显著改变，这一影响也将在本研究计划中进行研究。利用我们研究组目前可用的数值模拟技术，将检查大量的流场。我们将研究潜在等离子体致动器设计的时间精确模拟，并将其与我们研究组收集的实验数据进行比较。这将提供有关如何优化设计以最大限度地实现所需诱导流动行为的信息，并有助于理解结果背后的物理原理。这一提议的成功结果将促进在磁流体动力学模拟、等离子体产生和用于推进的高速流动操纵领域的知识进步。通过将等离子体激励器(目前正在国际上进行大量研究和开发)整合为一种新型的内部火箭技术，将培训一批强大的加拿大研究人员。

The study and development of high speed airbreathing propulsion is generally associated with countries at the forefront of advanced propulsion systems. The research required to understand and develop these concepts often has application to a much wider variety of fields. Recent research conducted at Carleton University in collaboration with the JAXA Kakuda Space Propulsion Center on airbreathing rocket propulsion has experimentally shown that the Exchange Inlet concept is effective at significantly decreasing engine length while behaving closer to the theoretical optimum than more conventional designs. Plasma actuators have been shown to be effective on a wide range of devices at low speeds in terms of modifying boundary layers for the delay or acceleration of separation. However, their potential effect on internal high speed aerodynamics is an open field of research. Therefore, the combination of both of these technologies (Exchange Inlet and plasma actuator) will provide a unique opportunity to contribute to advanced propulsion technologies through studying the fundamental principles that govern the relationship between compressible aerodynamics and electromagnetics. Similar to the concept of radical farming in scramjet propulsion, sequential operation of plasma actuators can create pockets of ionized flow. These pockets can be manipulated electromagnetically if sufficient ionization is achieved to accelerate, extract/input energy, or actively guide the flow. Depending on the design of the plasma actuator, small jets, recirculation, and swirl can be generated to create small flow perturbations. These can be beneficial to processes which require mixing (such as rapid combustion) and also to inlet and internal flows which generally operate most effectively when the flow follows the wall contour. The magnitude and shape of these perturbations can be changed significantly depending on the design of the plasma actuator itself, an effect that will also be studied in this research proposal. Using numerical simulation techniques currently available in our research group, numerous flowfields will be examined. Time accurate simulations of potential plasma actuator designs will be studied and compared to experimental data collected by our research group. This will yield information on how best to optimize the design to maximize the desired induced flow behavior as well as help understand the physical principles underlying the results. A successful outcome of this proposal will advance knowledge in the areas magnetohydrodynamic simulation, plasma generation, and high speed flow manipulation for propulsion. Through the incorporation plasma actuators (which in isolation are currently under considerable research and development internationally) into a novel, in house, rocket technology, a strong body of Canadian researchers will be trained.